Sue B

It’s easy enough to create a Gantt chart in excel. That is how I do my schedules at work in it’s simplist form. No formulas, just coloured cells. If you are good with excel, you can get as complex as you like and use it to self filll using date criteria - I have never bothered (and I love excel and use it every day for real stuff). Excel is of course not free but most people have access to it (or an alternative of some description). We do have MS Project at work but for a one off build, as others have said, you are just guessing upon more guessing, and getting a false sense of where you should be and it is far too complex to learn just for this. I did do do a simple Gantt chart (excel cells coloured in) for our last build and it helped a little to know when things needed ordering by in the first 6 months when all the trades were on site. It also worked as an helpful list for me of the various tasks in the order they needed to happen in.. Once it was just us, getting labour as and when needed, it was no use whatsoever anymore of course.

I would try going to the BM to get a trade discount from them due to the amount of materials you will be purchasing. Then you can buy the materials yourself and still ge the VAT reclaimed.

I think it probably was - we really struggled with it and even had an L connector to try and ease the situation

@ProDave can I ask did you use HDMI leads that were long or cable that you wired into an HDMI socket? Last build we put the longest HDMi lead into the wall and it failed about a year after it was all connected up - it just stopped working and actually fell apart when we took it out of the socket to see what the probelm was.

Getting a finished floor plan that will work for us to give to an architect (or architect technician) to “make it pretty” . Planning permission Build the garage and more importantly my sewing room. I have quilts and “stuff” to make.

We are still in the planning stages and are looking at Velox as our ICF system. They have a flooring solution which I am assuming would act as the roof top. When we meet with Marek in the new year to look further at this build method, it will be one of the issues we will be asking about.

Up to plan 16 - a long way still to go. Starting to get all the water together which is a help. I've decided to take the garage away and add my sewing room to that which will be a separate building replacing the car port. I still like the idea of roof lights for the bathrooms upstairs - cost will determine if that is possible or not of course. We have now visited @D Walter to see Velox on site. Really like the look of the procudt and it helps that his site is beautiful and the house will be stunning. I reckong there are a fair few more designs to work through - my memory of last time is that I ending up printing them all out, writing on each why we had discounted that plan and what we liked about it. I then got the best bits from them all. I seem to remember that the actual plan we used was a fairly early version but it just needed flipping over. For timescales, we are hoping for planning permission by early summer, foundations in place fairly quickly after that and then building the garage / sewing room. We can then see if we are capable to actually building ourselves and get an idea of how much labour we will need on site. Picking up one of the internal wall boards on David's site was an eye opener due to it's weight - we could barely lift it!! Anyway, here is the most up to date version.

And yes - I had done that too. I had to wait for a cold day, turn all the rooms off and turn the problem one on and wait. It took over a day to prove but only a few minutes to correct once I knew what I’d done.

The only thing I can contribute is remembering the confusion over our controls last time round. We had laid the UFH ourselves, run the cat 5 (e) cabling to each room control and wired it up myself (OH who did the rest of the first fix said he knew nothing about cat 5 cable so I had to do it). Wired up the control box in the garage, reading manuals endlessly to make sure it all worked fine. it all seemed ok but I couldn’t work out why it was on at certain times. I was used to an old fashioned timer, on off, on off with a very up to the moment 5 and 2 day rotation - state of the art stuff!! I missed the vital piece piece of information that the new room controls were not on off on off but simply room temperature targets for 4 separate times during the day. It took two weeks of scratching head to realise that my confusion over the control wanting a temperature at point 4 (which I thought was turning it off) became clear. The manual was clear, I was just being dense!

I saw a mention of Homebase further up - this may be of use to anyone in South East Dorset. The Homebase Store on the Mallard retail park is a clearance outlet. Not sure how long it will last there and stock is variable due to the nature of the place. https://www.homebase.co.uk/clearance-outlet-stores

The main road taking people towards Bournemouth (A338) had major road works the first year we came down. It took much longer than necessary due to the need to create barriers to keep the reptiles away from the road - there is a lot of heathland type countryside around here. I remember the pain of finishing a build. The sheer indifference to actually finishing it. We spent 2 years without a proper kitchen. The rest of the house was finished, we ran out of money and then lost interest in doing the kitchen. We lived with slow cookers, temporary building lights, a sink and draining board from the caravan, propped in a corner, old wobbly tables from my OHs school that were about to be thrown out instead of cupboards and worktops. One morning I just woke up and decided it was time to go for it. Three months later we had a kitchen fitted and looking wonderful.

There has been no mention of the fabled GCN so i’m hopeful that they may pass us by. When we were renewing the bloody awful planning permission last year they did talk bats to us but then looked at the structure and we avoided a bat survey. fingers crossed.

The plot runs west to east so the length of the patio will be completely south facing. We are heading towards a modern style of house with a flat roof. The reason being that neither of us like looking at solar panels. A flat roof means that we can have solar panels on top but not see them. We can also have separate banks facing east, south and west to get the sun all day long without worrying about which way the roof faces. I have a hatred of being too hot so I am paranoid about having a house that I cannot keep cool. I am therefore planning to have the first floor coming out by about 1m to give some shade during the height of the summer to the living areas. None of the bedrooms upstairs have south facing windows - wide balconies (I'll be fitting fly screens as the bugs round here are enormous!) and doors that can be opened wide. Probably need some kind of shutters to allow ventilation whilst staying secure inside overnight. The bathrooms - I'm thinking roof lights with blinds. We had sunpipes in the last house and they worked great - it saved wall space in small rooms where windows would have got in the way of placing sanitary ware in a space efficient way. We are planning to build in ICF - costs mean that we will be doing this ourselves (heaven help us!!!) and are currently comparing Durisol and Velox. Durisol looks a little easier but I think that Velox may be easier to get air-tight. The garage is only if we can get it past the planners. I think they may go for it with some explanation of needing a bedroom downstairs for elderly MIL and getting rid of the existing car port place. Be gentle with me but I am very open to ideas.

So..... We have lived her for 3 years now and got the feel of the place. It's now time to get my arse into gear and start work on building the new house before getting a mortgage becomes completely unaffordable. We have 1.5 acres in Dorset, flat and quiet and not overlooked. We have planning permission for a replacement dwelling as what we currently live in is classed as a temporary structure and therefore un-mortgagable. I can hardly believe we are going to build again. To do it once by accident is careless, twice is downright lunacy! We just wanted to live somewhere with a bit of land for the dogs to run wild and the only thing we could afford was this place. Our neighbours each side are horses - council owned on one side and the other side have tried to get permission for a dwelling that they can live in but have been refused. The rest of the lane has similar problems and the council have refused planning on most plots. We are green belt and within 400m of a SSSI (St Catherines Hill) - apparently there are a lot of Adders up there which I'm glad I didn't know about when we moved here or I may have thought twice. Luckily we have never seen one when walking the dogs up there. When I designed the last house I thought it was hard because we were constrained to 45ft wide and no more - the neighbours would have complained if we had built on their bit . I always wanted just a little bit more to make the rooms a better size, contraints I now realise actually help focus the mind a little. It took to plan 32 before I got pretty much everything I wanted last time so being on plan 11 means I have a long way to go yet. The picture shows our plot, we have built a kitchen garden since arriving and a large koi pond (you can see it right next to the kitchen garden - it's a rounded triangle shape). The house that we currently live in can stay in place until we are ready to move in to our new house. The planning conditions state that it must be removed from site within 28 days of completion. The house is the light blue circle. The lime green circle is where the utility room / car port / shed / dog shower is currently. We are hoping that we may get the planners to allow us to replace this structure and incorpotate it into our build - currently they are restricting the size of the dwelling to 197m2. We will be building the new house where the red circle is and the yellow circle is the gate that we will use to drive through to get down the plot or park round the back. We have seen pictures of when our current house was tractored onto site from 5 plots up - the concrete underneath is thick and reinforced. We are therefore planning to have this as our patio / decking area so the new house needs to be a close as possible to the current place and in a similar position else we will be spending a lot of money on replacing soil and removing concrete. Wish me luck - Christmas is going to be attached to my laptop, drinking pink gin and muttering about the stupidity of building at our age! Oh and visiting @D Walter on the IOW to look at Velox.

I have a friend who did just that. Unfortunately he then put the template on the vinyl back, not the top. A beautifully cut piece of vinyl that fitted wonderfully, if you wanted to see the back not the pattern.

We had 5 amp sockets in our lounge and all 4 bedrooms in our last build. I really loved it. I much prefer table lights to a central light. Having the table lamps controlled by a light switch meant the central lights were rarely used.

On our last build, we had blinds built into the double glazed units. They were ordered with no problems. Paid for with no problems They arrived without the blinds. I spoke with the supplier who accepted the error and said to fit the windows as they were and the new glazing units would be sent within the week. I questioned whether the glazing would fit, twice, and was assured everything would be fine. The double glazed units are deeper if they have the blind in of course. Glazing units duly arrive and don’t fit. Window supplier, egg on face, come out and rectify. Luckily this was a local company that could move quickly to fix things but the absolute assurance that they were correct and that I was a mad woman who knew nothing was staggering.

I’ve seen your plans - they look very interesting. Harbour views are beautiful in your area. We are considering 2 ICF products - Durisol and Velox. Both made of the same “stuff” but different shapes and ways of getting them together. We have been to see the Durisol build in Lulworth Avenue - that has been standing for a couple of months with no concrete pour as there has been a planning issue. The blocks seem very solid even without the concrete. i haven’t searched for any local ICF builders as we are intending to build ourselves (very slowly) but interesting that there is one so near. We may well have a chat to them to see if they have ever used any other ICF product. I suspect that they are Logix users? We too have planning but it is horrible. Trying to do something a little more to our liking at the moment.

I’m the same. We put a kitchen into our temporary structure that we are currently living in about 18months ago and got the third degree from the salesman about no extractor hood. I just never use it. In our last build I found a pop up extractor - i’d never seen anything like it and had to have it. I didn’t want to hit my head on a hanging down hood. I can’t remember the make but it’s none of those mentioned, something from Germany. It was quite noisy and really didn’t work very well.

I am planning the design for our new build and have created a nicely sized plant room on the ground floor. In our last build, our MVHR was put up in the loft and this appears to be a very standard place. However, it was horrible to get to to change the filters and more importantly, in this build we are having a flat roof so no lofts in sight! Is there any possible reason why the MVHR cannot go downstairs? If the intake and exhause vents need to be at first floor level, is there normally any resitriction on the length of pipework? We haven't even looked at MVHR units yet so checking the spec of "our" unit isn't possible. If there is no reason not to put it downstairs, am I missing something in wanting it accesible? I know you only change the filters once or twice a year ( not sure because I am not the one who would venture into the loft to do the deed), but it just seems to make better sense to me. It also caused us lots of issues when it came to doing the air-tightness tests at the end. We have learnt a lot from that build which was lovely to live in but cost a fortune to heat.

I spoke to Marek again today - his email to me with pictures of builds had not sent so I got a whole series of them today. I can't believe that one of the builds was the Surf School on our local beach. Less that 3 miles away and a beach that we visit regularly as our beach hut is within 50 feet of it!! I must have gone up before we moved to that beach hut! @D Walter - I'd love to come and visit. It looks like you are nearing your shell completion so would love to come before you do your final pour. Any idea when that pour is likely to be?

@JSHarris - we were actually in New Denham which is the other side of the Denham roundabout. A little place called Willowbank where every house seemed to suffer from subsidence. The original houses were all built in the 1920s with very little foundations. When the environment agency did flood relief works, the water table dropped and the bungalows all started to crack. The place is basically an island with the grand union canal on one side (our garden backed onto it) and the other side of the island had the river colne as a boundary. One road on and off opposite Rank Xerox UK head office. A lovely little gem of a place within walking distance of a tube station into London. I cried when we shut the door for the last time there even though we have a lovely life down here. That house was designed by me over a period of two years before I got it right on verion 32. We spent 12 very happy years there.

@mvincentd - that is the one we went to look at. Their planning decision is expected in January when they can hopefully pour the concrete. The blocks have been up for a while and they are looking out over the harbour. The house will be stunning once built.i don't envy them in the caravan all winter though. We ar lucky in that we should be able to continue living in this structure while we build. We have to remove this structure within 28 days of completion so if anyone knows of a way of getting a 20ft wide structure down a track probably no wider than 12 ft, they are welcome to a build home that is much more comfortable than a caravan

I spoke to the UK rep last week and he was overseas. He asked me to email him which I have done but had no response so far. Over the phone he mentioned builds in Devon and Hampshire. Englsih was not his first language and his geography of "local" was different to mine. We are East Dorset and I suspect we will be driving to Exeter to see a hotel being built out of the stuff. I suspect the Hampshire build is the one by @D Walter on the Isle of Wight. Are you up for visitors @D Walter if I can get dog sitters arranged for the day?

We came across Velox on this forum and I really like what I see with the product. Are there any builds near me at the moment? I am in Christchurch, Dorset.